The political situation then was sad enough when I got back from Bellagio in the June of 1993. But I also faced a sad personal loss, in the sudden death of David Woolger. Since the death of Richard de Zoysa in 1990, he had been I think my favourite companion and, in the last couple of years before he died, we had travelled frequently together outside Colombo, in addition to meeting regularly for work as well as food and drink at his house in Stratford Avenue.

I had first met him in 1984 soon after I had joined the British Council. One of my first big jobs was to take a film crew round the country, since Sri Lanka had been selected as one of the countries to feature in the anniversary programme the Council had commissioned for its I think 50th anniversary. I learnt a lot then about the development work of the Council, including the massive Construction Industry Training Project it administered up in Galkulama. The Jayewardene government had sensibly started this when it embarked on its massive construction programme round the country, both Premadsa’s Housing Programme and Gamini Dissanayake’s Accelerated Mahaweli Programme.

It was a great pity the Rajapaksa government did not do something similar when it started its construction programme in the North, for one constant complaint at my Reconciliation Committee meetings at Divisional Secretariats was that outsiders were brought in for all the jobs. I found indeed that the Vocational Training Centres in the North had very few students, so that now I have sought, as Chairman of the Tertiary and Vocational Education Commission, to get special aid for the poorer Districts there to recruit more young people into the sector. Continue reading →

I also much relished in my new job the opportunities I had to travel outside Colombo, to explore again and again what I had once described as the widest range of beauty to be found in the smallest compass in the whole world.

I had got used to frequent travel in my last years at the British Council, first for the office on the Furniture Project which had been started for the North and East soon after the Indo-Lankan Accord. When that unraveled, we had persuaded the Overseas Development Administration to transfer the funds to two other Districts, in addition to Amparai, which remained comparatively safe for travel.

The two selected, because of their proximity to the East, were Matale and Matara. I was able therefore to drop in frequently on my Aunt Ena in Aluwihare and on my father’s brother and his wife in Getamanna. But I also stayed often in Resthouses, and grew to love what I saw as their unity in diversity. The country had a range at different levels of comfort and cleanliness, ranging from the dingy old one at Mahiyangana to the lovely new one in the same city, on the bank of the Mahaweli. I loved too the little ones, at Batulu Oya, and Weerawila overlooking the reservoir, and Anamaduwa looking over paddy fields when Chandrika first changed the clocks and the evening stretched out for ages, as I remembered from Summer Time at Oxford. Continue reading →

In addition to writing and loafing, there was also much talking. In the early years there was usually some sort of a party there, one or other member of what we termed the Hard Core, the group of relations (which of course included Shanthi Wilson, her parents having been close to both Ena and Phyllis for decades) which went to Yala. As that generation, my sister and Raji and Suren Ratwatte, and those they wed in the course of the eighties, became too busy for more than the occasional trip, I found an older generation in attendance, to go with Ena to Yala and also spend time at Alu. Nihal and Dodo Fernando were the main figures early on, and later Ismeth and Dileeni Raheem, all of them entertaining companions, full of fascinating information, not always the most useful.

I also took up several of my own friends, all my foreign guests whom I thought worthy of the honour, and the few local friends I thought Ena would find congenial. Ena’s favourite amongst them was Nirmali Hettiarachchi, who also took her family up on occasion, while Jeevan Thiagarajah also got on extremely well with Ena though I would have thought they did not have much in common. But, like Richard, his ancestors had been part of the circles Ena had moved in, and even more than Richard he had extremely good manners of an old fashioned sort, which Ena much appreciated. She did not however have any good words to say about Jeevans’s wife, and as usual her instincts proved correct, for some years later there was a most acrimonious parting. Continue reading →

She had agreed to help with a new course the government had instituted, to teach English to prospective undergraduates before their university courses began. The former Commissioner of Motor Traffic, Wilfred Jayasuriya, had been put in charge, but he proved not only efficient but keenly interested in the subject. He had elaborate plans about the texts that should be prepared, but Valerie agreed with my suggestion that we produce small booklets in a range of subjects, and he fell in with the idea.

Wilfred was indeed a refreshing person to work with after the formulaic approach I had seen previously with regard to university level English. In addition to establishing a network of nearly 100 centres islandwide for the General English Language Teaching (GELT) Project as it was known, he had a series of training and other seminars. The one I remember best happened at the height of the JVP terror, when they used to declare days of mourning and forbid people to go to work. I was able to take the risk, since the Council was so near to my house, but my mother’s worries when I set out on days when hardly anyone was moving suggested how serious the problem could have been.

The last of Wilfred’s seminars was on such a day, and none of the participants turned up, except the keen old lady who coordinated the Centre at St. Servatius in Matara. She had obviously come to Colombo on the previous day, but how she managed to walk to the BMICH defeats me.

If the country seemed to me to be doing better in the early nineties, the British Council was a much more depressing place. John Keleher had left in 1989, changing jobs with Clive Taylor who had administered English Language Teaching in the region from London. It was, as John put it, a silly exchange since John and his wife Chris loved Sri Lanka. They lived in the house Geoffrey Bawa had developed for Druvi de Saram in Ward Place from an old rambling family house, and they enjoyed it thoroughly, entertaining often and lavishly, for any group suggested to them, visitors, young trainees at the Council, the various English Language experts in residence, writers in English.

Clive was much more traditional and he and his wife Judith found living in the East difficult, but they did their best to cope, and he proved a delightful man to work for. Unfortunately, in 1990, Rex Baker also left, and was replaced by someone who consciously saw himself as representing the new Council. I was on the ship for the first part of 1990, and therefore not there when he arrived, but I do not know that I could have done much for Clive. Neil Kemp made his life a misery, obviously relishing the fact that he had been promoted swiftly to head a country representation while the much older Clive was his Deputy. By the time I came back Clive had resigned, from Colombo and from the Council. Not entirely surprisingly, John in London followed suit soon afterwards, finding London and the new directions the Council was taking quite unbearable.

Scott’s workshops were not the only innovations we were pursuing in the field of drama. After the initial programmes of dramatized readings, we had moved on to full length plays, Richard’s ‘Merchant’ and then Steve’s ‘Anarchist’, and we clearly had a pool of very talented youngsters willing to learn and put in long hours. I realized however that this gave them as much pleasure, indeed more perhaps, than it gave us and the audiences.

I should note that I was able to indulge myself too through the dramatized readings we did. In 1985 Yolande had produced the adaptation of ‘Electra’ that I had written way back in 1970. Ernest MacIntyre, the doyen then of innovative English theatre in Sri Lanka, had been impressed by the script, and was even planning a production. Meanwhile he recorded some of it for radio, with Suvimalee Karunaratne as Clytemnestra – a lady of great grace but also intensity, who is now a Buddhist nun – and this was scheduled for broadcast in April.

It was cancelled at the last minute, and we had to listen instead to music by Bert Bacharach, which I have disliked ever since. It turned out that the authorities had got cold feet, because the plot concerned a woman who had killed her husband, and then been killed in turn by her children, Electra who was determined to revenge her father, and Orestes who was less certain but who Electra ensured lived up to her image of him. Since the JVP insurrection had just broken out, some bright spark in the SLBC thought that the play was a clarion call to the youth to take up arms against the wicked Mrs Bandaranaike, who was being accused of having killed her husband.

If aid to English was what interested me most, more spectacular was what the British in the early eighties saw as the flagship of their training programmes, a Construction Industry Training Project that was obviously intended to help with the large infrastructure development programmes that Jayewardene and Premadasa had initiated. I suppose it is a sign of comparative poverty now, as much as of hostility to the current government, that the British provide us with no such assistance for the much more comprehensive, if less grandiose, programme of infrastructural development in which this government is engaged. Fortunately the Japanese have continued as helpful now as they were earlier, and there are lots of others to contribute largesse now, who in the eighties were still far behind the West with regard to political and economic influence.